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Top Data Risks from Mobile Travel & How to Address Them

This year, there will be over 459 million business trips and 1.7 billion leisure trips in the US alone. Unlike work laptops, mobile phones seldom leave our sides, which means that our smartphones are tagging along for the ride on all of these trips. Unfortunately, mobile threats can increase significantly when employees travel, specially when employees have their guard down as they have trip details on their mind, protecting corporate sensitive data is not high on their list of priorities during a personal or work trip.

What are the main threats that employees will face? What can IT and security professionals do to protect employees while they travel? Is it possible to not only prevent them from exposing corporate sensitive data while abroad, but prevent them from bringing mobile risks back to the workplace when they return?

The Appthority Mobile Threat Team (MTT) gets these types of questions often, so we’ve created a webinar to discuss the many risks traveling employees encounter and offer effective solutions to protect the employee devices & data without increasing workload on IT and security teams.

Here’s a short preview of the types of threats we will discuss:

Threat 1:

Employees rely on their smartphones to stay connected, whether at home or abroad. Companies usually love this, as they get to leverage employee productivity at rates never seen before wide scale smartphone adoption. Even while on vacation a large percentage of employees regularly check work email and log into work related apps. However, even this behavior has dramatic risks. To save on data consumption or expensive international data roaming costs, employees often join dodgy hotel, airport, or coffee shop “Free Wifi”, even when at their best these networks are often poorly protected and at worst, are intentionally set up to compromise devices via Man in The Middle (MiTM), spear phishing, or other attacks. In certain countries, even 4G/LTE networks are routinely monitored by government agencies. How can employees protect themselves from network based threats?

Threat 2:

Smartphones are often seen as expensive luxury items, making them a huge target for thieves. However, smartphones are stolen not only for the monetary value of the hardware, but for the value of the sensitive personal and corporate information stored in the device. With criminal gangs increasingly becoming more tech savvy, it’s now more important than ever to quickly react to lost and stolen phones before the data which resides on these devices, or can be accessed through the apps is compromised. Does your company have a policy to address lost and stolen phones? Are your employees properly trained on how (and when) to report a stolen device?

Threat 3:

Mobile malware is also a top concern. Although malware is seen in a very low number of devices in the US, certain regions have much higher malware incidence rates. Further, some travel destinations offer free wifi, free content, or free events as means of tricking employees into side loading apps from unofficial app stores. These common social engineering techniques often result in infecting devices with malware, allowing attackers full control of the device. Further, when your employees eventually return to work, the infected devices could also wreak havoc on your company’s network. How can you protect employee devices from drive-by-malware attacks during travel?

Join us on this on-demand webinar, Keeping Enterprise Data Safe from Mobile Travel Risks to explore these and other mobile security threats, as well as to learn how to protect your employee devices, the data found in these devices, as well as the networks they connect to.